Hi Brooke - great post and you seem to be on the right track. I would add one more characteristic to the list and that would be resilience. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, your website slides down the search rankings and it can be enormously frustrating. A good SEO needs to be able to pick themselves up and move on!Heather

I don't know why clients try to become pseudo-SEO experts when choosing a consultancy. They read a couple of articles that simplify the discipline beyond recognition and then base their decision of weird and abstract factors that have no relevance to the value of the service provided. Why don't they ask to see the analytics over time for the SEO company's own website and that of the company's clients. The basic Google Analytics graph will tell them much more about the quality and credibility of the agency and its ability to generate results than anything else!

And for anyone in the UK and in B2B - go to the Guardian Professional Networks. If you've got good enough content you can usually get some great posting opportunities that send heaps of traffic to your site and thoroughly impress your social networks.

Thanks. I hate the stereotype that B2B is boring. It makes it SO difficult to attract good people to the industry. The reality is that there are much more opportunities to shine creatively in B2B marketing - it's easy to come up with a great campaign for promoting Red Bull. But you have to REALLY think outside the box if you want to promote a data centre or a piece of accounting software!

Ben, thanks for the great post. I have a question for you: How did you learn all this stuff? I am teaching myself Google Analytics, but the Analytics IQ webinars are not great - they seem to be based on an old version and they are tiny!Can you recommend books / tutorials or consultants? Thanks

Kirk Thanks for your response. If your main goal is to increase PageRank, that could be done without having any positive impact on the business. For example, I run a digital marketing company that services B2B organisations. If I wanted to increase PageRank, I could focus on building the authority of my blog. A relatively slow way to do this is to continue to offer helpful advice to B2B organisations. This builds engagement and trust in our brand, which will be of benefit in the long run. A quicker way to do this would be to write clever, funny content that takes the Mickey out of our competitors, or that insults people in the industry. While this is not something I am completely averse to doing (as there are many jokers in our industry!), it could start to convey a negative perception of our brand. However, everyone loves a bitch and I'm sure blog nastiness would serve to increase website visitors, shares and links (and hence PageRank). But the impact on the business would be negligible. Therefore, a client looking to increase PagaRank has the wrong goal in mind. Every client should be looking to increase sales/engagement/profile through SEO rather than just a random metric like PR. Hope that's clear. H

Rand, thanks for the post. I have used three SEO companies in the past, one of which produced good results. But in the end, it didn't work out with any of them, so I taught myself SEO (thanks for The Art of SEO by the way - incredible resource and I appreciate your updating it in December). The problems I faced were:

1. The companies were staffed by technical people, where seo is evolving to be more of a business consulting service. These people knew how to build directory links and add keywords to my meta titles, but none of them took the time to genuinely understand my business. The result was that our meta descriptions were okay, but they were always slightly off. Keyword research required a lot of my time, as they didn't get the subtle differences between targeting 'video production company' (which we are) and 'video production studio' (which we do not offer) for example.

2. The one that produced good results was so in demand, that he took on more work than he could handle, and went off the radar for weeks at a time when I really needed to speak to him.

3. NONE of them communicated what they were doing in a way that I (at the time an SEO newbie) could understand. They talked keywords and meta descriptions and alt tags, which might as well have been another language as far as I was concerned.

If I were advising someone to choose an SEO provider, I would focus on:

1. Business goal focus: ask this question to see what they say. Like: I want to increase my Pagerank - can you help? The company that has your overall business objectives in mind will respond: that's a weird objective, may I ask why? The company that doesn't will respond: sure, we can do that.

2. Understanding of your business and your target audience: I would make it very clear in your brief that the company you choose will be based on their understanding of your business and market. They need to demonstrate that in proposals.

3. Analytics data: rather than asking for refeerences, why not ask for analytics data for their clients - ask them to show organic search traffic graphs over their contract period. This should be a good indication of quality.

Thanks this is a great post. Would you say that patience matters too? I fell like I have been doing everything right for the past six weeks, but I have made no progress in terms of moving up the rankings - it's really annoying me!

This is a very thorough and highly valuable article - a real service to the SEO community. I've experienced problems with site speed in the past, as revealed by WebPageTest.org. It's one of the most frustrating elements of SEO because it is completely out of my control. When I mention it to my web designer (who is in control of site speed), he uses Pingdom and gets a completely different result. Has anyone else had this problem in the past?

Paddy I couldn't agree more. I have tried so many SEO shortcuts, and they never work. That's because hiring some guy on $5 an hour to build links, or write copy for you will never generate the results you are looking for. If someone like that could add the same value that your business adds to your clients, then your business is charging too much! There is only one way to optimise your site. And that's the hard way!

Thanks for the post. Does anyone else get annoyed the YouTube doesn't seem to reward recency of content? When you work in search engine marketing, a post from July 2012 is already out of date by December 2012. From a user perspective, I wish YouTube would be more like Google.

Stephen, This is so interesting. I have doubled my blog's FB engagement through advertising and it has been really cost effective as well.I'm going to run a little experiment to see if changing the images makes any difference. Thanks Heather

Thanks Pratik - this is really comprehensive. It's so true that the easier it is to generate a backlink, the lower the quality of that link. Even when I use guest blogging platforms, I am always amazed at the bizarre mix of blogs that offer to publish my posts. I recently had a post about blogging published on a blog, only to find that the previous post was about a cleavage competition!!